Nat Turner is the founder of Our School at Blair Grocery, a youth education center in the Katrina-ravaged 9th Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Meet Nat Turner, who drove a school bus to New Orleans with a dream of healing the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina. He gained national attention for transforming an abandoned grocery store into a community youth education center, Our School Blair Grocery, where he teaches kids to sell vegetables instead of crack. Most of his students come from within the Ninth Ward, and for some it’s is not just a classroom; it’s a sanctuary.

Renewable energy is providing reliable electricity
today in the United States and around the world.
From 2007 to 2012, electricity from renewable sources
such as wind and solar nearly quadrupled nationally.
This growth is part of a transition away from dirty,
coal-burning power plants−which harm public health
and destabilize our climate−toward cleaner, more
sustainable sources of electricity. Using existing
technologies and smart policy decisions, the United States
can continue this clean energy transformation while
maintaining a reliable and affordable electricity system.

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two−thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes −− and his work so far shows −− that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world. Full bio »

Worldwide population growth and the related rapid increase in urbanization is already posing problems in many areas for the management of that most precious of resources, water. With these problems only set to intensify, the Organization for Economic Co−Operation and Development (OECD) has released a report outlining the challenges humanity faces to maintain water resources in the face of demographic growth and climate change.

Trenberth: The answer to the oft−asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be...

Researchers at the University of Nottingham have developed another weapon in the ongoing war to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuel-burning power plants. The researchers have created a new porous material called NOTT-300 that they claim is cheaper and more efficient than existing materials at capturing polluting gases, such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, from flue gas. Read More

Recently, drought seems to be a fact of life. As the lead photograph poignantly illustrates, most of the U.S. has been struggling with serious levels of drought for the past several years. Worldwide, drought affected areas include Europe, India and Pakistan, Russia, much of Africa, South America − the list goes on. But when the rains start again, everyone expresses great relief, not realizing that long−term depletion of groundwater reserves is part of the price for surviving drought. It was with this in mind that GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), a joint U.S. and German space project, was designed a decade ago. Read More

Two House Democrats have released a report that aims to connect the dots on climate change and extreme weather events.

The staff report, issued by Henry Waxman (D−Calif.) and Edward Markey (D−Mass.), outlines the past year’s record−setting temperatures, storms, droughts, water levels and wildfires, and is being circulated in an attempt to rebuild congressional momentum to address climate change.

“The evidence is overwhelming — climate change is occurring and it is occurring now,” said Rep. Waxman, a Ranking Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement.

The report outlines the stunning array of record−breaking extreme weather events throughout 2012 within five categories: Read More

Mitt Romney’s stance on avoiding action on global warming has been well established.

Saying last year that he believes reducing CO2 emissions is “not the right course for us,” Romney falsely claimed that “we don’t know” what is causing climate change.

Actually, we do know. Even a prominent scientist funded by the Koch brothers agreed with the scientific consensus when he recently concluded that “humans are almost entirely the cause” of our warming planet.
Read More

Over the last year, there’s been increasing talk in Washington political circles − including conservative ones − about how to use a carbon tax as a deficit reduction tool. However, with an election season in full swing and a large number of Congressional Republicans campaigning against climate action, the current likelihood of getting a price on carbon is officially zero.
Read More

Posted on M−CAN 9−25−2012

Old Posts

Boosting solar cell efficiency is seen as a key factor in making them more practical, but there is another way of looking at the matter ... if the price of those cells were lowered, we could generate more power simply by using more of them. That’s where Mississippi−based Twin Creeks Technologies comes into the picture. The company has developed a method of making crystalline silicon wafers which it says could reduce the cost of solar cell production by half.

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Local solar Installers in Durango and the greater Four Corner’s area recently joined forces to create the Southwest Solar Industry Association (SSIA), a trade group designed to educate and promote the local solar industry.

“The idea behind the group was to advance our shared interests,” says John Shaw of Shaw Solar. “Most of the installers already know each other, and there is always a friendly competition −; but when it comes to promoting local solar, or responding to an state or LPEA policy issue, we can usually come to a consensus quickly.”

About SSIA

The Southwest Solar Industry Association (SSIA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2011 to represent solar energy system installers in the Four Corners and surrounding areas.

Empire Electric Director’s Election 2012

Two district seats are open for election in 2012.
They are District 4 (Bill Mollenkopf, incumbent) and District 7 (John Porter, incumbent) broadly described as follows:

District 4 is generally the northeastern portion of the service area including the town of Dolores. The eastern boundary is the eastern boundary of the Empire Electric service area. The northern boundary is the northern boundary of the Empire Electric service area. The western boundary is generally the section lines along which Montezuma County Road 29 runs. The southern boundary is east along section lines approximately 1 mile south of the intersection of Montezuma County Roads 29 and M.

District 7 is generally the eastern and southern portions of the city of Cortez and the Montezuma County area south of Cortez and north of Montezuma County Road H. The eastern boundary is the section lines along which Montezuma County Road 27 runs. The northern boundary is the section lines along which Empire Street in Cortez runs west to the intersection of Empire and Mildred Streets in Cortez, south along Mildred Street in Cortez to Highway 160, and then west along Highway 160 to the intersection of Highway 160 and 491. The western boundary is Highway 491 to its intersection with the section lines along which Montezuma County Road H runs. The southern boundary is the section lines along which Montezuma County Road H runs.

Read this in the Country Life Magazine online on pg 12
by clicking here

ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2011) − A group of 19 scientists from five research organizations have conducted the broadest field study of ocean acidification to date using sensors developed at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

If a new technology pans out, the fading notion that hydrogen will someday supplant fossil fuels may be on the verge of a comeback.

There was a time in the early 90’s when the fuel cell was touted as the clean energy technology of the future. The only byproduct was water and it also packed a whole lot more energy than electric car batteries. For instance, nine pounds of the stuff was enough to enable a vehicle to go 150 miles. However, methods to generate hydrogen were in and of themselves energy intensive. And ultimately, the concept of needing energy to produce energy was problematic enough to make it a dealbreaker for many green investors.

But now researchers at Penn state have demonstrated an innovative “self-powered” process of producing hydrogen that, if scalable, can revive interest in fuel cell technology.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2011) − NOAA’s updated Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), which measures the direct climate influence of many greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, shows a continued steady upward trend that began with the Industrial Revolution of the 1880s.

Started in 2004, the AGGI reached 1.29 in 2010. That means the combined heating effect of long-lived greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activities has increased by 29 percent since 1990, the "index" year used as a baseline for comparison.

A new analysis reveals that greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 surpassed even the worst-case scenario envisioned by scientists four years ago.

After a brief siesta during the recession, global emissions of carbon dioxide are already breaking records again, according to a new analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy. The 2010 data suggest CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now higher than a worst-case scenario predicted four years ago, the Associated Press reports, revealing just how helpless humanity has been in trying to slow down global warming.

Yes! We had a Tesla at the 2010 Verde Fest in the afternoon thanks very much to Mr. Christoph Henkel of Dunton Hot Springs Resort. The plug-in Prius was provided by Love Bug Motors (lovebugmotors.net)of Durango.

What To Do With a Broken CFL

Everyone may not know that Compact Flourescent Lights contain small amounts of mercury. If you break a CFL, you must be careful how you go about cleaning and disposing of it. For instance, you should immediately open windows to get good ventilation. This EPA website gives very specific directions about how to clean up and dispose of a broken CFL.

EACH of us took turns over the past 43 years running the Environmental Protection Agency. We served Republican presidents, but we have a message that transcends political affiliation: the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change, at home and internationally.

There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected.

For owners of electric vehicles, powering their homes and cars using solar panels mounted on the roof are a win−win scenario.

Not only do they get to drive past every gas station, but home electricity bills are reduced or even eliminated.

That’s great news for the end user, but not so much for the utility companies. Caught napping by rising demand for solar, the energy industry now wants to stem its spread before their own profits are harmed.

(CNN) − Scientists look at a warming Arctic and see a shift from white to green, as tundra gives way to new plant life.

Governments and corporations are also seeing green, as receding ice cover opens new shipping routes and opportunities to get at long−hidden natural resources.

But the downside of those opportunities is the risk that the current pace of climate change could be sped up dramatically by the release of long−trapped methane gas in the region’s permafrost −− a risk to which a new study has attached an eye−popping price tag of $60 trillion in the next several decades, on top of previous estimates.